Paul Oskar Kristeller

Paul Oskar Kristeller ( May 22nd, 1905 in Berlin, † June 7, 1999 in New York ) was a German - American humanism researcher and historian of philosophy.

Life

Kristeller grew up in an assimilated Jewish family in Berlin. The sometimes -to-find claim that he was a grandson of Samuel Kristeller gynecologist is wrong. Kristeller attended from 1911 to 1923 the Mommsen -Gymnasium in Berlin. He had for nine years of Latin and six years Greek, one of his teachers was the philosophy historian Ernst Hoffmann, studied with the Kristeller Plato and where he took his first Heidelberg Philosophy Seminar 1923 ( on Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics ). Kristeller also studied philosophy of Karl Jaspers ( also in Heidelberg ), Richard Kroner (1924 in Freiburg ) and Martin Heidegger ( 1926 in Marburg). Other subjects were medieval history (with Karl Ludwig Hampe and Friedrich Baethgen ), but also mathematics. Kristeller also heard lectures in German literature, linguistics, musicology, physics and art history.

Kristeller finished with his thesis on Plotinus, at Ernst Hoffmann, his studies at the University of Heidelberg, followed, in 1929, a study of classical philology in Berlin with Werner Jaeger and Eduard Norden. Kristeller acquired in winter 1930/31 his state examination for teachers at secondary schools with a written in Latin treatise on the first speech of Pericles in Thucydides, which started Jaegersche concepts.

Kristeller went from 1931 to 1933 to Freiburg to Heidegger, who dissuaded him from a school career and took Krist Ellers proposal for a post-doctoral thesis on Marsilio Ficino. Kristeller began his work in Berlin and led her away in Italy, where he lived from 1934. With Giovanni Gentile's support he could teach at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa German. Gentile supported the publication of Krist Ellers Supplementum Ficinianum and his book on Ficino. He helped him personally, than the anti-Semitic legislation in 1938 provided for Krist Ellers dismissal, and also help to emigrate to the United States of America.

There Kristeller taught briefly at Yale University, but he soon moved to Columbia University in New York, where he taught until his retirement in 1973 and conducted research. In 1957/58 he was president of the New York Renaissance Society of America.

In 1984 he was MacArthur Fellow.

Reception

His main focus of research was in the field of philosophy of the Renaissance and humanism. Important developments include, for example, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Pietro Pomponazzi.

Special merit he earned by the Iter italicum (the title is reminiscent of the Iter Alemannicum and other works by Martin Gerbert ), a mammoth work, in which he described countless previously uncharted manuscripts.

Writings

  • The concept of the soul in the ethics of Plotinus. Mohr, Tübingen 1929 (Dissertation, University of Heidelberg, 1928).
  • The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. New York, 1943.
  • The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1948.
  • The Italian Renaissance universities. Scherpe, Krefeld 1953.
  • The Classics and Renaissance Thought. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1955.
  • The Italian humanism and its meaning. Helbing and Lichtenhahn, Basel 1969
  • The philosophy of Marsilio Ficino. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1972.
  • Humanism and the Renaissance. Fink, Munich 1980.
  • Studies in the History of Rhetoric and the concept of man in the Renaissance. Gratia, Göttingen 1981.
  • The ideas as thoughts of the human and divine reason. '. Winter, Heidelberg, 1989, ISBN 3-598-25030-4.
  • Latin Manuscript Books Before 1600's. Monumenta Historica Germaniae. . Cosmopolitan Science and Art Service, New York 1948, 4th edition: Munich 1993.
  • Iter italicum. A finding list of uncatalogued or incompletely cataloged humanistic manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and other libraries. Brill, Leiden 1995, ISBN 90-04-10122-5 (1 CD -ROM, identical to the ed London 1963-1997 ).
  • (Ed.) The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. Petrarca, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pomponazzi, Vives. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill. 1996.
  • Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters. 4 volumes. Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, Rome from 1956 to 1996.
The Renaissance Society of America Integrated Authority File
638412
de